Cinderella Stories, Why Men Never Get Over Their First Loves, and ‘Panic in Central Park’-Thoughts on the Male Fantasy of Anonymity

This week I’ve been reading Eve’s Hollywood, and though her accounts of Hollywood High and the Chateau Marmont are fascinating, nothing stuck with me quite like the chapter “The Fantasy.” Babitz discusses the male fantasy of anonymity: the dream of a woman who will sleep with him without knowing his name, love him without the promise that he will provide or stay forever. Accepting this male fantasy, Babitz explains, would be giving up what it is to be a woman: the female fantasy that desires a future with someone, stability. Men cannot fulfill their fantasy of anonymity while providing the stable future women attach themselves to and women cannot adopt the male fantasy of no-names without abandoning their own identity as a woman.

It is with this paradox of fantasy in mind that I have been thinking about a different kind of fantasy–kinds of Cinderella stories and why they appeal to girls who dream of being whisked off their feet into happily-ever-after. The familiar Cinderella escapes from the enslavement of her step-family to her future with the prince–obtaining the female fantasy of a stable future. Many women have been Cinderella, “taking the better deal,” or escaping the constraints of their oppressive or oppressively ordinary life through choosing the rich man, or the most beneficial path to the “happily ever after” they fantasize of. 

The Cinderella story mimics Simone de Beauvoir’s discussion “The Woman in Love,” in which she writes: “since she is anyway doomed to dependence, she will prefer to serve a god rather than obey tyrants - parents, husband, or protector.” In discovering her identity and rescuing her from her enslavement, the prince becomes God to Cinderella, and devotion to him her religion. Her love for him is contingent on the fact that his status fulfills her fantasy of stability.

However, within the Cinderella tale that seems to be the epitome of the female fantasy, paradoxes like the one of fantasies I discuss above are in place–pillars of a system of heterosexuality that is designed to fail women. It is for this reason that Cinderella stories, like many other fairy tales, don’t appeal to men. Cinderella directly contradicts the male fantasy: she is the anonymous woman in her story, and the prince is not in love with her, he is obsessed with the idea that she has the anonymity that he so badly desires. He HAS to figure out who she is, or else she gets away with having spent a night with him fully aware of his royal status while remaining entirely anonymous. There is no place for the anonymous woman in the male fantasy of no-names: the man can remain unknown but he MUST discover who she is, must unveil her “real self.” 

The more that I think about this idea of the male fantasy of anonymity, I realize that it just might explain the common belief that “men never get over their first loves.” Men continue to dream about their first loves because they are perhaps the only likely possibility of a woman who will love them with this fantasy of no-names. They fantasize about their first love still being willing to be with them because of their history together, regardless of if they’ve changed, regardless of their career, regardless of their circumstances. While any woman with the fantasy of a stable future would refuse to stay with an anonymous man, it is entirely more reasonable for a woman to reunite with her ex-boyfriend despite him being an entirely different person, in a different situation, with an entirely different career or interests. I know I’ve been there. 

It’s with these thoughts that I began to think about HBO’s Girls, as one does, because everything seems to relate back to it. The episode “Panic in Central Park” seems at first glance to be a Cinderella story for Marnie–she escapes from the prison of her marriage to Desi– swept off her feet by her ex who dresses her in a gown, brings her along to a fancy event, and invites her to run away with him. Blinded by their past together, Marnie fails to realize that she is perpetuating Charlie’s own fantasy. By agreeing to see him, sleep with him, run away with him, all while being unaware of his current circumstances, Marnie is fulfilling the male fantasy of a woman who will devote themselves to the anonymous man. Marnie appears to be “taking the better deal,” choosing her history with Charlie and the possibility of running away with her true love after years apart over her marriage, where she is suffocated and toyed with. Her discovery of the used needle in Charlie’s pants is a moment of disillusionment for the both of them. For Charlie, who loses his anonymity and whose circumstances are revealed, the fantasy of a woman loving him without knowing who he is is disrupted. The clock has also struck midnight for Marnie, who realizes that neither “deal” she can take is better and returns home barefoot in her ballgown to end her marriage with Desi.